This film is a result of four years of dialogue, friendship and exchange between CAMP and a group of sailors from Kutch, who come to Sharjah often. Their travels and those of co-seafarers from Sindh, Baluchistan and Southern Iran show us a world cut into many pieces, not easily bridged by nostalgics or nationalists. Instead, the artist’s follow the physical crossings made by these groups of people who make and sail boats and who also make videos, sometimes with songs married to them. A boat has many powers: to gather a society in its making, to distribute goods, to carry people and ideas across places that, it seems to us, are more different than ever before. The phrase “Boat modes” is a useful term used to express the peculiar and flexible ways in which these boats are manifest in the Western Indian Ocean. But it also has other possibilities; such as to follow Bruno Latour in asking a question “in a way that a specific kind of agency appears.” A matter of tone, or key. Or to create further paths from these boats’ continued expansion of categories such as “sovereign”, “pirate”, “container”, “free trade”, “money”, and “work” at such points where known maritime histories and economics seem to say: “End!” Modes appear at the intersection of forces and environments, and are arranged here in the shape of the constellation Pleiades, or Thurayya in Gujarati and Arabic navigation maps. They accompany a film that takes us on a journey from the Gulf of Kutch in India to the U.A.E. to Somali ports, and back.